Memoir From Antproof Case (8 page)

"I beg your pardon, sir?" I asked, never having been forced to this kind of thought.

Because I was not allowed to employ anyone in Paris or use the railroads to ship tens of thousands of birds and bats to the City of Light, I had to design and manufacture a huge cannon. This involved everything I had learned about physics, metallurgy, chemistry, geometry, and geology (I had to mine my own metals, make my own tools, build my own buildings). Unfortunately, to get the grasshoppers, I had to destroy the whole city. My answer was only hypothetical. How was I to know that it would become the underlying logic of the rest of the twentieth century?

Every day, the rector would present such a problem—sometimes purely scientific, sometimes technological, poetic, historical, political, or aesthetic, and often a combination of several of these. His queries were always interesting and often ingenious. Even when they were fruitless, the many frustrating approaches that we followed toward their unobtainable solution made such problems immensely entertaining. He might say, "You are to write a sonnet after Shakespeare, in French, using the rules of Italian prosody," or he might drop me into the forests of northern Canada and instruct me (all in theory, of course) to survive the winter and construct a coliseum of snow and walrus bones.

Where I erred, he corrected; when I was lost, he showed me the beginning of the way. My favorite problems were the short imperatives: "Solve the problems of Revolutionary France." (First I had to figure out what they were.) "Design an electrical machine for the flawless generation of music." This I did, in theory, and many years later in Brazil I encountered what are called synthesizers, and I smiled. "Develop the economy of Egypt." I had a good plan: they didn't follow it. "Tell me what this is," he would say, handing me a flask of goo. Having committed to memory many of the techniques of qualitative and quantitative analysis, I would return in a few days with a list of components in their absolute and proportionate quantities.

All this while doing hard labor in the fields, rising at five, climbing ice-clad peaks, and cutting and hauling firewood. As if to confirm that life is the academy of fate, the only question he asked more than once was, as usual, in the form of a command. In fact, he presented me with the same challenge four or five times, and each time I took a few days to make an intricate plan. His exhortation was, "Rob the Bank of England."

In Paris at the several cafés in which I had lingered in my straitjacket, with Spinney, I had seen women dressed according to the fashions of the times. Their hair was carefully coifed, their faces made up, their fingers lasciviously adorned with rings, their necks with necklaces, their wrists with bracelets. I assumed—from what the rector had told me about her beauty, and because she was a Parisienne—that Miss Mayevska would be an exemplar of such seductive arts. I assumed that she would be able to afford the silk, perfume, and gold that can so magnify a woman's natural beauty, for after all, Château Parfilage was one of the most expensive mental institutions in western Switzerland. But though I had heard her gorgeous transcriptions, often in my dreams, for several months before I actually met her, I hadn't had the slightest idea of Miss Mayevska until I saw her face. Never have I loved anyone more, and never will I.

This does not prejudice my affection for Marlise, but I have loved Marlise solely according to the tropical paradigm, which means that in our sweat-filled, screaming, gasping, semihallucinatory dalliance we have achieved a certain intimacy. Our flesh and fluids have been pressed, mixed, or imbibed with such vigor that at times we have been unsure which one of us was or was not the other.

But I never slept with Miss Mayevska, though I must have kissed her for a thousand hours, and it is with Miss Mayevska, though I have not seen her since August of 1923, that I will always be most the intimate.

At first I fell in love with her merely because of the rector's suggestion. It is easy to fall in love that way, but it is also easy to fall out. Then it was after I heard her own transcription of Bruch's Opus 46. Father Bromeus, always a literalist, made me compare the two scores. To adapt the work for the piano she had added a great deal, subtracted much, and varied the tempo quite often, but the soul of the piece was still in it, and it was just as beautiful, or more.

I still had not seen her, but it hardly mattered, for the way she played went straight to my heart, as if we could communicate only through the high messengers of the spirit that, one hopes, remain after death.

But as precisely attuned as she was to the most refined apprehension of the world and to questions of purpose and ultimate disposition, she was also a girl of sixteen, and therefore, mischievous, ambitious, and charming, although I did not quite understand her youthful charm, thinking of her as an older woman.

The first time I saw her ... and if I close my eyes I can remember the day, the hour, and the feel of Alpine sun against my face ... was in the highest meadow we had, as we were bringing in the hay, in August of nineteen hundred and nineteen.

It was a sight to see: patients and staff, men, women, boys, and girls, two dozen nationalities and as many neuroses and psychoses, some in odd ethnic costumes, some barely able to move at the high altitude, others laboring like spiders in a windstorm. Brueghel would not have been surprised by the colors—an otherworldly blue sky, and golden sheaves thrown down all around us like the muted but sparkling armor of Achilles, shining calmly in the light of a twirling and levitated sun. Nor would he have been surprised by the expressions of the laborers, which ranged from the cockeyed to the stunned to the intensely fearful. But they were all nice people: I knew them quite well.

At about eight in the morning a second group had joined us. I had not even noticed them, so busy was I at the work. I stepped to the back of a hay wagon, burdened with four sheaves, to show to anyone in the world who might be watching that I was strong, but I dropped three on the way. Intending to toss into the wagon the one I still held and quickly run back for the others, I threw it so high that it lingered above me for an instant that seemed to empty the air of time.

And then I turned, because another sheaf had been thrown, and although it did not glide like mine it made a graceful arc and it, too, seemed to hesitate at the top for an unusually long moment.

Miss Mayevska and I stood not a foot apart, our faces flushed from the early morning sun, the bracing air, and our labor. I had never seen such fine, buoyant, black hair, nor eyes so deeply blue, clearly magnified through gold-rimmed spectacles with whitened edges of ground glass. She was breathing through her mouth, which gave her an expression of expectation and surprise.

We stood frozen in place for some time, and then she smiled. It was the most exquisite smile I have ever seen, with tiny crescents between mouth and cheek, as in nearly all beautiful women.

I had no more control of myself than a hart struck deeply by an arrow, and I felt so much like embracing her that I had to do something to prevent my arms from seeking her by themselves, so I spoke, but without knowing what I was saying, and I said, "Oh! Moose Mishevsky. Miss Mishoovsky," and then (she told me much later) my lips moved without making a sound, as if I were a lunatic in an insane asylum.

I worked near her for the rest of the morning, stealing glances so often that I repeatedly bumped into the hay wagon. I was ravished by the tentative, apprehensive way she moved through the hay, and I could not help but love her for her nonsensical affliction. The only thing wrong with her, the one thing in the world, was that she feared grasshoppers. I had always liked grasshoppers, and loved crickets, but I renounced them forever. Tell me why it is that they put her in an insane asylum because she grew hysterical at the sight of a grasshopper? (She could not even shell peas, because of what a wide pea pod, viewed from the side, resembles.) Tell me why it is that, later, as I flew patrols over the Mediterranean and returned to a base in Tunisia, she, her husband, and her two girls were put in a cattle car and sent to their slaughter in a death camp on the plains of Poland not far from the place where she had spent her infant childhood?

That is, I suppose, part of the reason that my love for her has grown, and keeps on growing, and why I love her as a believing Catholic loves a saint. But even before the war, when we could not imagine her fate, I loved her with a seriousness and melancholy that was unusual in a boy.

And then I was seventeen, which is not to say that I skipped fifteen and sixteen but that those years passed very fast and in a near-continuum of falling snow, terrible storms, and brilliant Alpine days (the very opposite of the climate here), and that I passed these strenuous days and nights in the company of monks, nuns, and the inmates of an insane asylum. I myself was not insane. What I had done was entirely justifiable and in self-defense. The problem, it seemed, was that the result was so horrific it called for some sort of reaction from the system of justice.

You hear a lot about the reasons for crime, how it comes from unrelieved suffering, and is in its greatest part a tragedy. But that is not so. Crime—and I should know—is first and foremost a phenomenon of opportunity. One commits a crime not to avenge oneself upon a world that has treated one cruelly, but, rather, for a sense of accomplishment, for the joy of getting something for nothing, for the thrill and the risk, for the freedom of exiting the social structure, and, most of all, I think, for the unparalleled and incomparable elation of
escape.

If your crime involves great skill and meticulous planning, so much the better, but, as I believe I have said, crime is unpardonable and inexcusable if it wounds. The only decent crime is that which strikes against evil. Otherwise it is detestable. For example, robbing banks in Kansas hurts innocent people, whereas robbing banks in New York does not.

I have always thought that the theft of immensely expensive jewelry, as long as it involves no physical harm, is no more immoral than a good game of Capture the Flag. With apologies to the various dukes, duchesses, and movie stars who have connected with some of my very agile colleagues, million-dollar stickpins are easily insolent enough to make them fair game. Oh, yes, I know ... the economics of it is that the fool with the million-dollar stickpin has freed his money to work for someone else, who might buy an asparagus farm and provide real pleasure for ten thousand Belgians, or invest in a mine from which will come the metal that will form the arm that holds the massive silvered light by which a team of surgeons saves the life of a child. But, even if the thief takes the diamond, the money is still free to work.

Most people like me are the way they are because they find themselves warring against the social system from the outside. Pity them not, however, for in the vast majority of cases it has been their choice and they have committed some despicable and harmful act.

I, however, was set apart by a series of entirely coincidental events that elicited from me an entirely justifiable response. In those days we had the electric chair and it was used. I ought to know: for a few months I thought I was going to sit in it, and the most notable of these contraptions was in. the town where I grew up (so to speak). Nonetheless, my ultimate disposition, despite a physical attack (before the sentencing) upon the judge who sentenced me, was to be sent to what turned out to have been perhaps the finest prep school in the world. It certainly had the best view and the most favorable student-teacher ratio of any academy on earth. What it lacked, I suppose, was what I have always lacked—the society of fellows.

In some ways, I prefer the company of women. Miss Mayevska, Constance, Marlise, and other women, I grant you, have either left me or died, though I'm hoping that Marlise will be the first to break the pattern. Perhaps after I'm dead she'll see the kind of pictures that float before my eyes as I sit in this garden.

It's very early in the morning in the park in Niterói, and a red bird just darted across my line of sight, from right to left. It was one of those tropical things, with a long yellow and blue tail, that the boys in the
favelas
try to trap because they can sell it, for five years of ordinary income, to bird smugglers who come on yachts from New York. I hope he is never captured, even if his plumage forces me to recall the fate of the Walloon on the train. After almost seventy years, I am beginning to feel regret—not because I had any choice in what I did, but because he may have had redeeming qualities that I unwittingly canceled along with the rest.

Though now I am in the garden, watching the newly risen sun pave the sea with yellow gold, and tangled in the blurred red ribbons of birds that streak by and set the mild morning air on fire, my memory insistently places before me the image of Miss Mayevska, at nineteen years of age, exquisitely wrapped in black sable, standing at midnight in the blinding Arctic sun.

It isn't a dream, it happened, though it was so long ago and so far away that now it has made of time the most beautiful adagio. The memory would have become only theory were it not for the continuing strength and presence of Miss Mayevska, who, despite her death, exists in some invisible chamber of fact and truth, as if forever.

When I was seventeen, in my last year at Château Parfilage, she had already left and gone to study music in some grasshopper-free suburb of Berlin, a city that had been impoverished but had not yet gone mad. Little did I know then that I would someday fly over Berlin, businesslike and deathly afraid, numbed and sick, angry, determined, and ashamed, escorting bombers that dropped bombs that undoubtedly broke to smithereens the piano at which Miss Mayevska had studied in the years when I had loved and touched her. How wonderful was the time when neither she nor I knew of the destruction that lay ahead, when she was just a girl, when she was alive, and I had not been broken.

She arrived at the gate in June of 1922 (she had been released the previous autumn), and of course they let her in. Very gracefully, she greeted all those she had known, but she was making her way to me, and she found me as I was building a fence in one of the pastures high on a hill that overlooked half the world. I ran to her, dropping a hammer and a handful of carefully wrought pegs, but even as she drew closer, framed by an apron of snow that covered the Berner Oberland, my heart ached, because I knew I would soon be parting from her again.